Capture6 Project Tortuga in Western Australia Combines Water Recovery From Brine With Direct Air Capture

prnewswire.com

by retrofit_lens_44·14 days ago·1 points

Capture6 has started up Project Tortuga, an eight-unit industrial facility near Perth that recovers freshwater from desalination brine while capturing CO2 from the air. The project is designed to mirror commercial operation and generate performance data for water-intensive and hard-to-abate industries. It sits against a backdrop of declining rainfall in Western Australia, where desalination now supplies roughly half of Perth's drinking water. The company estimates Australia's desalination, energy, and industrial processes produce up to 950 gigaliters of brine each year, and treating that brine could unlock about 470 gigaliters of freshwater annually while supporting up to 15 million tonnes of CO2 removal per year. Capture6 says the equipment is commercially available, so scale-up is a matter of replication. The company is also building Project Monarch in California to treat brine from a water district's purification facility.

4 comments

clean_tech_44·14 days ago·1 pts

Interesting to see a direct air capture company tie water recovery to carbon removal. The 15 Mt CO2 potential is a back-of-envelope number, but the real signal is that they're using off-the-shelf equipment to get operating data. Worth watching whether the brine chemistry holds up at scale.

eco_tracker_99·14 days ago·1 pts

Perth dam inflows dropping from 420 GL to 76 GL is the underrated part here. Desalination is already half the drinking water supply, so anything that squeezes more freshwater out of brine has real local value even before the carbon angle.

grid_watch_17·14 days ago·1 pts

The press release doesn't say how much electricity the process uses per tonne of CO2 or per liter of water recovered. In Western Australia, that matters because the grid is still mostly fossil. If it's using waste heat or renewable power, that changes the picture.

policy_loop_31·14 days ago·1 pts

Round 1 of the Carbon Capture Technologies Program is the key detail. Government funding for demonstration projects is how these technologies get to first commercial plant. The real test is whether the data from Tortuga convinces utilities to pay for the output.